A recent New Yorker article by Atul Gawande has gotten a lot of attention (Big Med, Aug 13). The article is built around an intriguing observation: The Cheesecake Factory can churn out a high variety of dishes at consistently decent quality at reasonable prices across more than a hundred locations. The question then is whether healthcare providers can learn anything from the Cheesecake Factory?
It is an thought-provoking question. The Cheesecake Factory is one of many “service factories” in a variety of industries that provide decent service at very reasonable prices. Many (e.g., Jiffy Lube) do this by winnowing down the range of services they offer but the Cheesecake Factory has a huge menu and can handle some special requests. So Gawande takes a hard look at the Cheesecake Factory to see just how they do it and finds that the kitchen manager plays a special role:
I watched the kitchen manager for a while. At every Cheesecake Factory restaurant, a kitchen manager is stationed at the counter where the food comes off the line, and he rates the food on a scale of one to ten. A nine is near-perfect. An eight requires one or two corrections before going out to a guest. A seven needs three. A six is unacceptable and has to be redone. This inspection process seemed a tricky task. No one likes to be second-guessed. The kitchen manager prodded gently, being careful to praise as often as he corrected. (“Beautiful. Beautiful!” “The pattern of this pesto glaze is just right.”) But he didn’t hesitate to correct. …
The managers had all risen through the ranks. This earned them a certain amount of respect. They in turn seemed respectful of the cooks’ skills and experience. Still, the oversight is tight, and this seemed crucial to the success of the enterprise.
The managers monitored the pace, too—scanning the screens for a station stacking up red flags, indicating orders past the target time, and deciding whether to give the cooks at the station a nudge or an extra pair of hands. They watched for waste—wasted food, wasted time, wasted effort. The formula was Business 101: Use the right amount of goods and labor to deliver what customers want and no more. Anything more is waste, and waste is lost profit.
He then describes healthcare settings that function in a similar manner. For example, knee replacements.
John Wright is a New Zealander in his late fifties. He’s a tower crane of a man, six feet four inches tall, and so bald he barely seems to have eyebrows. He’s informal in attire—I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a tie, and he is as apt to do rounds in his zip-up anorak as in his white coat—but he exudes competence.
“Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do,” he told me. A few years ago, he gathered a group of people from every specialty involved—surgery, anesthesia, nursing, physical therapy—to formulate a single default way of doing knee replacements. They examined every detail, arguing their way through their past experiences and whatever evidence they could find. Essentially, they did what Luz considered the obvious thing to do: they studied what the best people were doing, figured out how to standardize it, and then tried to get everyone to follow suit.
They came up with a plan for anesthesia based on research studies—including giving certain pain medications before the patient entered the operating room and using spinal anesthesia plus an injection of local anesthetic to block the main nerve to the knee. They settled on a postoperative regimen, too. The day after a knee replacement, most orthopedic surgeons have their patients use a continuous passive-motion machine, which flexes and extends the knee as they lie in bed. Large-scale studies, though, have suggested that the machines don’t do much good. Sure enough, when the members of Wright’s group examined their own patients, they found that the ones without the machine got out of bed sooner after surgery, used less pain medication, and had more range of motion at discharge. So Wright instructed the hospital to get rid of the machines, and to use the money this saved (ninety thousand dollars a year) to pay for more physical therapy, something that is proven to help patient mobility. Therapy, starting the day after surgery, would increase from once to twice a day, including weekends. …
Wright has become the hospital’s kitchen manager—not always a pleasant role. He told me that about half of the surgeons appreciate what he’s doing. The other half tolerate it at best. One or two have been outright hostile. But he has persevered, because he’s gratified by the results. The surgeons now use a single manufacturer for seventy-five per cent of their implants, giving the hospital bargaining power that has helped slash its knee-implant costs by half. And the start-to-finish standardization has led to vastly better outcomes. The distance patients can walk two days after surgery has increased from fifty-three to eighty-five feet. Nine out of ten could stand, walk, and climb at least a few stairs independently by the time of discharge. The amount of narcotic pain medications they required fell by a third. They could also leave the hospital nearly a full day earlier on average (which saved some two thousand dollars per patient).
To my mind this comes down to process standardization and process ownership. The Cheesecake Factory works because they have thought carefully about how to prepare a dish and have tasked someone with making sure that happens. The knee replacement process is similar if more challenging. A line cook who is paid hourly has little choice but to play by the rules. When you are dealing with highly trained professionals, they have their own preferences and presumably reasons behind them. Imposing and monitoring standards becomes much harder. This is not particular to healthcare; I just came from a meeting on a curriculum review and people have their preference for how they do their class and would just as soon not have anyone mess with it.
Standardization is very appealing. The assertion that only 5% of work should be customized is compelling. The challenge is standardizing on what to do and, perhaps just as importantly, when to do it. We’ve written about this before. Once we reach the point that everyone agrees that a knee replacement needs to be done, the case for standardization is strong. If nothing else, it is an operation that is done in high volume and it should be possible to determine whether one process is better than another on some dimension. That doesn’t mean that we have found the best process; just that we know what isn’t the best.
But at that point, we have committed to surgery. How do we standardize getting to that point? That is, how can we articulate what is the appropriate mix of documented joint damage and stated patient discomfort to warrant surgery? That seems much harder to lock in. As soon as humans are involved, we have to recognize that different people will weigh aspects of risk and discomfort differently and there is no one right answer.
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